Deploying Laravel with Docker containers

Question

I plan to deploy my Laravel application with docker containers. I need the following components for my application:

• MySQl server
• nginx server
• cerbot for activation of ssl
• Queue worker for Laravel

Since the application is still under development (and probably will always be), it should be very easy to update (I will automate this with GitLab CI/CD) and it should have as little downtime as possible during the update. Also, I want to be able to host multiple instances of the application, whereby only the .env file for Laravel is different. In addition to the live application, I want to host a staging application.

My current approach is to create a container for the MySQL server, one for the nginx server and one for the queue worker. The application code would be a layer in the nginx server container and in the queue worker container. When updating the application, I would rebuild the nginx conatiner and queue worker container.
Is this a good approach? Or are there better ways to achieve this? And what would be a good approach for my mysql server, nginx server, php version,... to stay up to date without downtime for the application?

Answer 1

The main idea of the docker is to divide your app by containers. So yep it is good to have one container for one service. In your example, I suggest keeping MySQL in one container the queue worker in another and so on. As a result, u will have containers for each service. Then suggest to create the internal docket network and connect containers to them. Also, I suggest using docker volumes to store all your application data. To make it much easyer I suggest for configuration to use docker compose.